A lot of people don’t seem to remember Alex Jones getting banned from YouTube in 2018. While rightwing, ultra-MAGA’s were already a thing, they were relatively small compared today. Alex Jones was the first high profile ban from social media and it was like tossing gasoline onto a small bush fire.

You have to remember that Trump did not win the first time because he had an army of fanatics. A lot of other factors were at play; from people still upset about the DNC’s snubbing of Bernie, to people who weren’t fully paying attention (remember, politics used to be boring), to people who voted for Trump simply “for the lols” (don’t discount this last group, any historical account that doesn’t factor in how important internet memes were to getting that man elected is being willfully ignorant) . Die-hard MAGA’s were relatively rare, and usually a source of ridicule.

Until their spokespeople started getting banned from places. It seems so small by today’s standards. People get banned and deplatformed all the time. But Alex Jones was the first real incident, and people saw it as a massive attack on free speech. To his relatively small number of followers, the man had his free speech rights violated by the left-wing news cabal for daring to speak the TRUTH™. Suddenly, all their bullshit was justified.

I’ve always been pretty far-left but I got a deep chill when that happened. I remember remarking to my friends that banning political speech, no matter how full of shit, would only cause problems in the long run, and so it has. Precedent was broken, and the right took it as a declaration of war. I truly believe things would not have gotten nearly as insane as they are had Google not decided to ban him. He deserved it, but they opened a door that couldn’t be shut again; and following this was a couple years of high-profile bans of rightwing figureheads and safe-spaces, all cumulating to the shut down of /r/theDonald in 2020. And the infection, which had been contained to a few small corners of the internet, suddenly exploded.

This isn’t reddit, you can edit titles.

Oh, so the US is not getting a single drop then. Everything Trump says is a lie. Everything.

This may come as a surprise to you, but you can both condemn Trump’s actions AND recognize that Maduro was an illegitimate leader that stole an election according to every third-party audit. And not just like “well it was close, who’s to say who really won?” but like the votes went 2-1 to his opponent. He lost BAD, but decided to lie, cling to power and attempt to imprison his opponent. Maduro is a vicious dictator and calling him an illegitimate leader is not just a claim, it’s a fact.

And yes, it’s also true that Trump’s actions were an illegal act of war. Full stop. No questions at all there. But the people trying to condemn this by making Maduro out to be some innocent saint are either trolls ignoring his corruption, or people so ignorant as to the situation that they should maybe just shut the fuck up until they spend more than 2 minutes learning about it.

Yea? How’s that lookin currently?

And then we should get all the world leaders in a big room and tell them they’re being bad. Then they’ll all sing and hold hands and stop all wars. And then later my mommy can make us all dino nuggies and we can watch Trollhunters on Netflix.

Yea, but that conflicts with the narrative that money and success can’t insulate you from depression and that everyone is secretly struggling exactly the same; so people have chosen to ignore that part.

Dude, it was 2022. AI was nothing back then. Certainly not something that people were debating the morality of at the time. It was a new tool. A developer tried it out for a few very minor assets that were only meant to be placeholders. This was’t “literally removing work from a human(concept artist)”. FFS, it probably was the concept artist who used it!

Like imagine a new type of paint comes out that’s supposed to spread on canvas better. An artist gets some and tries a few test strokes on a blank canvas, goes “huh, interesting”, and then paints over it entirely with traditional paint. Then, the public turns against the new paint. Maybe it’s made from orphan blood, maybe it causes cancer; it doesn’t matter why, but it is now heavily frowned upon to use it. An art studio displaying the original artists work puts out a claim that none of their art uses the new type of paint. Were they lying? Like, ya technically I guess, but if you can’t see the nuance and understand how such a thing could happen, then your logic is less that of a human, and more that of a machine.

They already had the replacement assets created upon release, but forgot to swap them out and it was missed in QA. That’s why, pretty much as soon as they discovered it, they got it all replaced just 5 days after release.

It’s pretty common for games to mistakenly release with minor assets still as placeholders instead of the official version. Who’s really going to look at something like the texture of a rock and be like “Wait just a minute! That’s not the official rock texture!”

The more you learn about this, the more understandable it is. The only people mad are those who don’t know the whole story, or those that are just looking for an excuse to be mad, no matter how dumb the excuse.

So what exactly did you do to piss off the Amazon Returns department? Because from my experience, they are the most lenient company when it comes to returns/refunds. I’ve had stuff arrive broken, or scuffed up, or it was the wrong item, or I just plain didn’t like a product and every time I’ve been able to submit a return without having to interact with a single person.

I feel like you either have to be lying about your experience, didn’t even try to return it, or did something that got your account flagged.

Frothing at the mouth

I’m not sure it was a lie, it’s the kind of thing that’s so minor it’s easy for someone on the marketing team to just not know about.

It’s like if a snack company put out a message saying they used no animal products and then later found out that a derivative of beeswax was used to lubricate some of the mechanisms in their packing machine.

If you want to be absolutely inflexible and refuse to allow any exceptions to the rules, no matter the circumstances, that’s fine. But you’ve gotta recognize the irony in that line of reasoning being more machine-like than human.

I’ve often thought about how society might be different if every year or so, we all voted on who was the worst person in the world, and then executed them. Similarly, voting for the worst company in the world and then dissolving it entirely, with executives and board members imprisoned. The absolute worst individuals and companies would have significant societal pressure to avoid being monsters. It wouldn’t even matter if everything they did was legal, it’s just a matter of public opinion.

Bill Wi the Science Fi

Wu Tang LAN

Pretty Fly for a Wifi

Uncle Touchy’s Puzzle Basement

Samsung Smart Vibrator

This LAN Is My LAN_5G

This LAN Is Your LAN_2.4G

Super Sales for Super Heroes

A friend recommended it to me. A little less than half way I had to stop and remind my friend that I am very gay and this book is basically just a harem anime.

I’m not disagreeing with that, but saying they “wouldn’t lose much by switching” is laughably untrue.

I’m not on either of them, but I’m also not confused as to how a group that’s wanting to run ads might prefer an audience of hundreds of millions of people instead of tens of millions.

Is a half opened pack loosely shoved into an already full junk drawer not good enough for you or something? I’ll have you know that only some of the loose batteries in there are dead.

Except, of course, for audience size. Which, if you are running ads, is sort of the main goal.

Every normal person will use gmail

I mean… She’s not wrong. Individuals privacy minded enough to avoid even basic Google services like Gmail are most definitely NOT the norm. Like, you’re not wrong for avoiding it, but don’t pretend like it’s some common thing that everyone does. You are VERY MUCH in the minority.

It’s basically like saying “every normal person will use Windows or Mac”. Wrong or right, that IS the norm.